WHEN HE FIRST APPEARS (2017)
For Soprano, Harp, and Viola with Fixed Media
Duration ca. 9:30
PROGRAM NOTES
In his Republic, Plato observes, “The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness... This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.” It is an adept observation that continues to apply to politics into the present day. In the late 2010s especially, numerous populist authoritarians rose to power in countries worldwide by promising — often scurrilously — security in the face of danger, or stability in the face of the unknown.
When He First Appears is an exploration of this phenomenon. The electronic component of the work uses sounds and speech drawn from news reports, while the soprano’s sung text is drawn from W.H. Auden’s Epitaph on a Tyrant:
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after / And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand, / And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, / And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
Commissioned by the Waterloo Region New Music Sessions (WRCMS). Premiered at Laurier University, Waterloo, ON (August 2017)
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